Nina Stibbe with her children: 'I don't think they heard a single swearword from us until they were well into key stage 2.'
"We'll have to stop swearing soon," I said to a friend as we watched our small
children playing together eight years ago. "I've already given up. I decided to stop last week and I haven't sworn since," she replied.
"What?" I said. "No clever techniques or gradual weaning-off?"
"No," she said, "I just stopped overnight. It's not appropriate for this part of my life."
That night I told my partner. "Stella's given up swearing," I said. "We'll have to give up now."
My partner and I are fond of swearwords. I especially like the bad ones and he's partial to the kind of inventive phrase you might hear on South Park. I was raised by an avid swearer – that's my excuse. He was raised by non-swearers – that's his. Anyway, the point is, we have always, as a couple, done it. When, heavily pregnant, I took a shortcut across an icy manhole cover and slipped over, my partner rushed over and called me a c*nt. He was very concerned and caring but in his eyes I was first and foremost a c*nt for putting our unborn child and myself at risk.
When our children were very small we did our utmost not to swear in front of them. We really did. During daylight hours we used friendly substitutes such as sugar, fudge and the occasional heck, and made up for it after they had gone to bed and swore at each other, about other people and at the telly until we went to bed.
We were disciplined about it and I don't think they heard a single swearword from us until they were well into key stage 2. We didn't even say "shut up" or "idiot". If they were badly behaved I did occasionally say they were to go next door to an eccentric old lady called Freda, to help groom her cats, or be put up for adoption but these threats were entirely swear-free and unbelievable.
Soon the children became aware of the wonderful shock value of decent swearwords and were ready to move on. To our delight they got hold of slightly wrong versions of some traditional swearwords and "ficken" and "crud" were established as really bad words plus "bloody", which they'd heard on Jam and Jerusalem and was thought to be bad but in an everyday sort of way.
Knowing that our happy acceptance of sugar, fudge and heck had taken the shine off them, we'd pretend to be surprised and a tiny bit shocked when either of them slipped the new words out. And once when a farmer on the telly referred to "tractor crud" we all gasped admiringly and said how bloody rude.
The young daughter of a writer I like grew up thinking the worst swearword was "Ugthorpe". That's because she very sensibly asked her mother what the worst swearword was and the mother – quick as a flash – came up with Ugthorpe.
I was interested (and jealous) because my son had recently asked me that very question. "What's actually the worst swearword?" he asked. "I know there's one than worse than ficken and crud."
The word I seized on was the slightly disappointing "Hale". We were on our bikes on a lane by a parked car and there was a sticker in the rear window advertising a car dealer – Hale's Cars.
"Hale," I said.
"God," he said, "is it really the rudest?"
"Yep," I said. "It's the worst."
"Poor Barbara," he said.
"Shit," I said, remembering Barbara Hale, his piano teacher.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing," I said.
When a while later, I heard about Ugthorpe, I wished I'd known about Ugthorpe when I was on that lane. Not only did I much prefer Ugthorpe to Hale, it being a fantastic word, but also my kids wouldn't now have a piano teacher called the equivalent of Barbara C*nt.
Shortly after, I tried to switch from Hale to Ugthorpe but my son was perfectly happy with Hale and convinced Ugthorpe was a nice place by the sea that his friend used to live in.
I still liked Ugthorpe, though, and wanted to pass it on. I rang my friend Stella to suggest she have it ready for when her son (now aged nine and slightly younger than my son) asked the worst swearword question.
"So when he asks, just say Ugthorpe," I said.
"No need, he's known about c*nt since we moved to Scotland," she said. "It's fine, I'm back swearing myself now."
I was starting to regret the phone call. Not only because Stella was being such a show off about her son's swearing repertoire but also because she began to ask philosophical/linguistic questions about it all – ie the number of people required to think of Ugthorpe as the worst, rudest word in the world before it would actually become that. It was time to put the phone down and tell the children the truth about Barbara Hale
